For Republicans, probing the JFK assassination isn't just about his death, it's also about discrediting the ‘deep state'

Boston Globe

02-04-2025

Advertisement
'The deep state, not only was it around during JFK's assassination, but it's here today,' Mace said. 'It is right before our eyes.'
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
The creation of the House Oversight Committee Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets this year and its first hearing on Tuesday — which featured two Kennedy assassination experts and Oliver Stone, director of the 1991 movie 'JFK' — has provided Republicans more than an opportunity to dive into decades-old alleged conspiracies. It has also given them a way to bash the federal government, right as President Trump is dramatically downsizing it.
'For far too long, the American people have had reasonable questions of what their government, which they fund every day, keeps hidden about certain issues,' Representative James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who heads the Oversight Committee, said in announcing the formation of the task force at a
Advertisement
The panel will also look at the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as the origins of COVID-19, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 'unidentified aerial phenomena' (commonly known as unidentified flying objects, or UFOS) and 'unidentified submerged objects,' Luna
said.
But the John F. Kennedy assassination continues to be the center of gravity for distrust of the federal government.
For decades, historians and amateur sleuths have had doubts about the role
of alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, and whether he was part of a broader plot to kill Kennedy. A 2023
'Aside from the conspiracy theories on the History Channel, there is sort of an aura around this case that people say, 'Wait, this guy did this on his own?''
Republican pollster Jon
McHenry said in an interview.
Trump, long distrustful of government, signed an executive order on Jan. 23 declassifying the remaining documents related to President Kennedy's assassination as well as sealed records of the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and King.
Advertisement
Historians have said there is no 'smoking gun' evidence so far of anything beyond the established story.
'I have not seen anything in the new releases that sheds significant light on the assassination,' Fredrik Logevall, a Harvard historian and author of the 2020 book, 'JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956,' said in an email.
But that wasn't the view of the task force's Republicans on Tuesday.
'The revelations emerging from these files are nothing short of staggering discoveries that challenge the long-held assumptions and raise profound questions about what we've been told happened on that day,' Luna said.
Luna, a rising Republican star, already had oversold an earlier development. On Friday,
But Gerald Posner, author of the 1993 book 'Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK,' noted on X that a copy of
Advertisement
'I told her it is NOT secret. It is NOT a definitive piece of evidence. It is NOT important to the JFK research community,' Morley
Morley, vice president the Mary Ferrell Foundation in Ipswich, Mass., the largest electronic archive of files on the assassinations of the 1960s, reiterated those points as a witness Tuesday. But Stone testified that it would be a good idea for the task force to get the original of the Darnell film and Luna said she planned to request it from NBC.
Posner said in an interview that he thought Republicans were simply using the task force for political purposes.
'I don't want to be the conspiracy theorist and say it's a plot to dismantle the deep state,' Posner said. 'But I think it's additional fuel in the fire for the consistent argument that the deep state tried to destroy Trump, and this is what they do to presidents they don't like.'
The bipartisan task force is stocked with Republicans who've embraced conspiracy theories, including the false assertion that Trump won the 2020 presidential election. But they appeared to still be getting up to speed on the Kennedy assassination. At Tuesday's hearing,
After Tuesday's hearing, Luna said she saw some parallels between her task force and the Trump administration's push to rein in the federal government, given the attempts by the CIA to withhold evidence related to what it knew about Oswald for years.
Advertisement
'If you have an agency that's operating outside the purview of the federal government, then you have a rogue entity,' she said. 'I'm not saying all agencies do that. But it's definitely evident that there have been factions ... within the intelligence agencies that were doing that.'
Jim Puzzanghera can be reached at